Category Archives: Writing

Stopping To Think; Or, In Which She Gets Philosophical

We tend to get caught up in our plans.

Plans are important. They give us direction and structure and context. But sometimes we forget to revisit them, to look at them and make sure they still match who we’ve become in the time between making the plans and the now. Because in the same way that adorable kittens become seventeen-pound cats and tiny babies become strong energetic children bound for kindergarten in less than two months and the novels you write take unexpected turns, we change, too, and to expect us to stick to a plan made for someone five years younger is moderately unrealistic. Five years is a lot of living, and a lot can happen in that space of time.

I’m not saying that everyone should scrap all their life plans. To completely reinvent a life plan every few years would be pointless and a waste of energy. But it’s important to re-evaluate, to seriously examine who you are and what you need on a regular basis to make sure that the details still apply. Otherwise, at some point you’ll lift your head and realise that you’re living the life or writing the book you planned out when you were twenty-eight, only now that you’re twenty years older you wish you weren’t.

Would those intervening twenty years be wasted? Not really; life experience is life experience. But it would have been nice to notice that you were changing along the way, and that the life path you had planned out wasn’t flexible enough to match you as you were evolving. It comes down to a question of efficiency, I suppose. And being as happy with yourself as you can be. Tiny changes along the way to match who you are at any given time are more efficient than a drastic life change at a much later date. Drastic changes are rather challenging to pull off; minor shifts are usually easier to handle.

Amanda Palmer, in a blog post wherein she did some self-examination in the light of her recent experience at a Lady Gaga show, said something that really made me stop and think:

here’s the thing.

it sometimes kills us to believe this, but you are ALWAYS free to choose a new path and hop off the one you’re on.
your expectations of yourself can change on a daily basis. it’s FINE.

your expectations of YOUR LIFE from when you were 12 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old, they will gnaw and haunt you. no doubt.
every love you left, every love you never chased, every career path you didn’t follow, every instrument you didn’t practice, every time you kept your mouth shut and should have spoken up, every time you said too much.
but none of that exists NOW. it’s gone, over, non-existent.

the same way your parents’ expectations haunt you. and your teachers and the noise of cultural expectations haunt you.
all these voices in your head bicker and argue and obscure the real key to freedom:
your ability to stand still and ask:

who do i want to be

and what do i want to do

RIGHT. NOW.

?

No, I’m not considering something drastic; I’m more philosophical at the moment than anything else. I just found this interesting in the light of a discussion we’re having over chez Emily’s Stark Raving Cello Blog about regrets and pie charts and difficulty embracing the now. We can change the parts of our lives we’re not happy with. It can be a scary thing to do, yes. I left a perfectly safe job to write, and following my bliss paid off (and yet, as I pointed out over there, I very often do not wish to be doing whatever I am currently doing at any given moment, so a major life change is not a guarantee of eternal contentment). And significant change should never be a whim; life plans need to be taken seriously. But we can look at our lives, ask what makes us happy right now, and embrace it without judgement. We need to accept that past things are past things, stop letting them drag us down, stop worrying about things beyond our control, and start focusing our energy on what we can do instead. Because really, we all need more happiness and less anxiety in our lives.

Can I do all that? I have to be honest; no, not completely. But I can try.

More Astonishment

Another eighteen hundred words written longhand last night.

Yesterday’s total word count: approximately 2,800

At the rate things are going, I’m going to need a proper icon for this story instead of defaulting to the plot bunny ambushed-by-writing icon.

Tuesday Activity Log

Today, I:

– wrote a blog post about yesterday’s writing
– made a hair appointment
– handled an electronic agenda crisis (my iPod Touch ATE MY APP and all the data I’d input in it over the past six months, sob)
– wrote two-thirds of the interview (hello, four solid hours of work)
– uploaded the steampunk cello scene to Cate (only a month after I wrote it, good grief)
– talked with real estate agent (I am very tired of all this — the process and the contracts and the legal deadlines, not our agent, who is brilliant in every way)
– planned some more of the trip (just wee bits left over from yesterday’s huge session)
– made Rice Krispie squares
– wrote about 1,000 words longhand

In Which She Blinks In Astonishment

I edited yesterday’s activity log to reflect the writing I did before I shut down the computer before supper, because while twenty-one hundred words was once upon a time a regular daily output for me, I haven’t really been writing for the past year due to a variety of reasons. Accordingly, I felt it was worth recording for myself. I’ve done a couple of brief scenes this last month, but nothing major.

Well, after I put the boy to bed and had a bath, I pulled my notebook and pen out again, and wrote for another two hours.

Yesterday’s total word count: 4,224.

(Approximately. This is all longhand, after all, and I’m not counting every single word on sixteen pages of longhand. I did the counting how many words per line on half a page, averaged them, then multiplied by the number of lines on the page, then by the number of pages.)

Ceri has characterised this as being tackled by fiction writing. I will gladly take being ambushed by a story. It’s not like it came out of nowhere, though; I thought the initial scene out two nights ago while trying to fall asleep, a result of wondering ‘What would I have done with that situation instead?’ at someone else’s story decision. And it all unrolled, a scene with a different setting and characters and unique backstory, set several months after the different decision I would have made as a storyteller. After a day or so I decided to write it out so I wouldn’t forget it, because I really liked it, and I’m glad I did, because it led to another different scene that followed the first. It’s very in media res, and while I thought it was a cliffhanger ending for something it could very well be the beginning of something else. It would certainly be a very active way to begin a story. I am enjoying it very much.

(Alas, Cate; while this is set in an alternate London, it is not our ladies’ cello society steampunk adventure. Which reminds me, I need to finally upload the scene I wrote a month ago for you. But every little bit helps get me back on the writing wagon, so to speak. Or the writing stagecoach, perhaps, to use a more appropriate metaphor?)

Monday Activity Log

Yeah, this is early, but I’m dead after five hours already, having hit the ground running today.

Today, I:

– wrote the weekend roundup
– researched routes for the trip
– researched rest/meal stops
– researched location of shops we need to pick things up at
– mapped all these things out
– hunted for and found my old folder of camping information
– finalised our budget (which made me very sad; HRH and I are paying a lot more on this trip than we would have if we’d gone alone in our car)
– made a list of the things we need to pick up from the inlaws’ camping gear
– liaised with HRH about the pile of our own camping equipment assembled in the garage
– handled correspondence
– invoiced for last week’s work
– booked off the freelance roster this week
– baked bread
– finalised lists of (and started assembling) personal stuff to bring like clothes and books
– worked on the draft of the interview questions (new self-imposed deadline: Wednesday)

And then I ran out of energy in the early afternoon. I need to go read for a bit, then possibly finish the baby blanket on the loom to disengage the brain and keep my fingers occupied.

LATER: Ha. The loom didn’t make it out. Instead, I wrote 2,115 original words of a scene that I thought up two nights ago. Longhand, even!

Treading Water

I’ve been having trouble recently trying to keep up with things and not sink under a general miasma of depression. There’s great stuff happening — the pre-approved mortgage which now allows us to act on the listings we’ve been researching for the past year, I’m writing again (baby steps, baby steps), great weather — but I’m struggling with the good old self-worth issue again. I’m dealing with a lot of general pain and achyness, my back is screwed up again, sleep is back to the waking-up-a-lot-and-not-hitting-deep-enough-cycles, and I seem to be saying, “Is [insert goal or activity here] worth it?” a lot more than usual.

Cello is currently freaking me out. Not only is there a lot of pressure at orchestra with new music that’s pushing us past our comfort zone again, but my teacher’s studio year-end recital is coming up and I’m uncomfortable with the lack of prep on the ensemble pieces. This isn’t necessarily me; a lot of people have missed the group classes for various reasons, and so our group pieces are all over the place. There’s that whole obstacle of the opening two notes of my solo piece which isn’t helping. Overall, it’s the pile of work that’s making me freeze like a deer in the headlights. It doesn’t help that when I do work on stuff, especially for orchestra, it doesn’t seem to matter or make a difference.

Most of my freelance assignments are coming back with requests for tweaks or rewrites, which isn’t helping my self-confidence at all. Monday I was ready to chuck it all and just spin yarn to sell on Etsy or something, because I obviously couldn’t handle my job, as light as it is. Rather surprisingly for me, I was proactive and wrote an e-mail to the coordinator I’ve been working with the longest and pointed out that I was getting a lot of revisions, and what could I be doing better? Her response was reassuring: I had been really strong for a couple of years, but had lately been developing a weirdness concerning one particular part of the manuscript evaluations I do, and she pinpointed it for me. I’d successfully addressed the not-positive-enough problem that had popped up in my work earlier, which was good to hear, but part of what had made me ready to give it all up on Monday was a criticism that I was being too positive now. (This has happened before; I’ve been corrected on a couple of things and applied them to the next few assignments, only to have my corrections pointed out as incorrect for a different reason. Frustrating, but all valid.) We talked about the new problematic issue and it was somewhat of a relief to hear that she didn’t know how to fix it either. A solution would have been nice, but both of us brainstormed a bit, and we’re trying a couple of different techniques to see if we can adjust things. I came away from it feeling a lot better, or at least I wasn’t writing up a resignation letter in my head any more, convinced that they were about to fire me.

I got two inches cut off my hair last week, which helped somewhat. Now when I look in the mirror I’m not cranky. I went to the salon around the corner that I’d tried just after the boy had been born; I’d felt neutral about it then, and still do, but it’s thirty dollars less than the salon that the stylist I’d been seeing for the past three or four years moved to. What she was charging at her last salon was pushing my budget; the new place made it impossible for me.

I spun two ounces of BFL in a pretty purply colourway; it’s one of the Fleece Artist braids that I picked up in Mahone Bay last summer, and reminds me very much of the colours inside a mussel shell, a couple of cooler purple shades with touches of pinky-browns and a bit of old rose-silver. It’s not quite long enough for what I’m aiming for, so I weighed out two ounces of tussah silk and started spinning that to ply with it. A handful in, I realised that the natural honey color of the tussah was lovely but was going to ruin the colour effect, so I messed about in the kitchen with my dyes and ended up with a truly gorgeous one of a kind colourway that will complement the BFL nicely:

It looks a bit muddy in the photo (silk doesn’t seem to photograph very well) but it’s got the same colours the BFL has, only sort of in reverse weight: mostly warm pinky-browns and blueish silver with the cool purple tone. I’m not sure exactly what it’s going to look like spun up and plied with the BFL, but I know it’s going to look beautiful:

I wrote 1200 words the other night, and five hundred yesterday before the boys came home and there was no hope of focusing. I think I’m going to have to draw up a schedule so I can check things like a half-hour of cello off, an hour of writing, some spinning or dyeing work, and block off time for whatever assignments come my way. Crossing things off a list make me feel much more secure regarding my time management. Last week I was attacked by naps pretty much every day, which didn’t help my productivity (but obviously rather important). So far this week I’ve avoided that, but I don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue avoiding them if I’m not sleeping at night.

2009 In Review

Better late than never. I’ve had this sitting in a file on my desktop, and I haven’t posted it because I was sure there was something I was forgetting. (There was: Neil Gaiman. Only the most exciting assignment I’ve ever been given, ever. Duh.)


Things I Did In 2009 That I Have Never Done Before:

Bought a brand-new cello.
Bought a spinning wheel and started spinning.
Joined a third social networking site (Twitter, which I vastly prefer to Facebook; I find FB very annoying, with a heck of a lot more noise than actual signal).
Canned a whole pile of garden tomatoes.
Performed a spiritual handfasting ceremony for two dear friends (not the same as legally marrying a couple, which I did for t! and Janice).
Sold my primary musical instrument (to someone very deserving!).
Bought my first Apple product, a Mac mini.
Interviewed Neil Gaiman in person.


Things I Did in 2009 Of Which I Am Proud:

I bought a new cello. If you follow my journal regularly you were privy to the angst I felt about the whole buying a new 7/8 cello when the 4/4 I had was so very excellent an instrument. This was a huge issue for me, because I had to deal with my preconceptions regarding thrift and what I deserve versus going overboard, and what constitutes any of those things. I am very, very happy with my choice to sell my first cello and buy this brand-new 7/8. The sound is evolving nicely and we play well together. We’re a good fit. This was HUGE for me. I am so very proud of myself for taking this enormously weighty step.

I am very proud of not quitting my cello lessons. As of mid-October it was one full year of lessons down, and I can tell that my technique has improved by leaps and bounds. I wasn’t ever really in danger of quitting them entirely, but I came close to asking to move to a biweekly schedule for the sake of finances, a move that would have had negative repercussions on my development.

I am proud of sticking it out in second chair at orchestra and not asking to be moved. I really, really struggled with the music this past fall, and I came very close to asking to be switched. Actually, I did ask, indirectly; I told the section leader that if she wanted to rotate me to the back to give someone else a chance, I’d be fine with that. She immediately vetoed that idea, which felt nice on one hand, but made my heart sink a little on the other. I’m sure this is very character-building for me.

I am thrilled with, and proud of, switching to a Mac computer. I’m pretty set in my ways (mainly because it takes energy to learn something new and there’s not a lot of that to spare) and learning a whole new interaction with a computer system was a bit intimidating. Apple made it very easy for me, though, and I’m terribly pleased with the whole affair. I vastly prefer it to Windows machines.

I am freakishly proud of stepping into the spinning hobby. Like the 7/8 cello and the move to a Mac, I researched exhaustively for months (rash is nowhere near my middle name) and finally decided to buy a spinning wheel. I thank Ceri form the bottom of my heart for giving me the early birthday present of a spindle workshop last spring.

And finally, I am also proud of the interview with Neil Gaiman. Not only did I step up to the plate and take the assignment from the lovely and talented Tamu at fps magazine instead of backing down because it would have been easier, but I actually got through it without fainting or choking or forgetting how to speak English. It was also just a pleasure to meet him and talk for twenty minutes. He is a wonderful person.

Good Things About 2009:

Taking up spinning. I can’t communicate how deeply this has affected me. It relaxes me, engages a part of my mind that I haven’t often engaged, and occupies my mind just enough to let everything else settle. Plus I get pretty yarn out of it.

Like last year I’m sure there’s more, of course; a lot of this year was good. But these are what stand out in my memory. I am still thankful for my friends, appreciative of them and their strengths, proud of their accomplishments and successes, and love spending time with them. I’ve also further refined my stop-spending-time-with-people-who-drain-me technique, with excellent benefits to my psyche and physical health. And I’m still working on the maintaining a decent balance as regards my physical energy, too, which goes well enough now that I understand I have to manage the energy carefully thanks to fibro.

Not-So-Good Things About 2009:

Scarlet fever. Come on. I mean, really. (Not that it was bad, just annoying. It was nowhere near as awful as the time I had it as a kid. I was fully operational and non-delirious the entire time. But still – scarlet fever?)

How Did I Do With My 2009 Wishes?

Further refine and develop my cello skills
Yay!

Finish and polish and start querying Orchestrated
Finished writing it and did a full edit on it, which is two out of three, anyway. Then the last quarter of 2009 happened and bam.

Keep on writing
Um. My writing has really, really, fallen by the wayside. I’m so tired that I can’t think ideas through any more. This really upsets me on one level, but on another I don’t have the energy to be upset. I suspect I’m shifting into a more editorial phase of my career, and you know, that’s just fine right now. After five books for the publisher and two and a half for myself over the past six years, I figure I’m entitled to some down time.

Start making all our own pasta
Fail! And all due to the unwillingness to invest in a pasta maker or attachment for the KitchenAid.

Plant, harvest, and preserve more vegetables from the garden
Win! We enlarged the garden by a quarter this year and got a really good crop of tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and carrots. We had a surprise cucumber plant emerge three months after we’d planted the seeds. The potatoes really worked well this summer, too, and they were delicious, although we didn’t’ get anything like a big yield (better than last year’s afterthought experiment, though). Our green onions did well too, but they were so small that it was hard to use them. It felt like I was wasting more than I actually got into the pot. Perhaps not the most efficient of crops; maybe full-size onions next year.

Save more money
Well, debt accumulation has been stopped in its tracks, but paying it off is happening very, very slowly. Part of this has to do with my income readjusting, since I no longer consult with the publisher and get large chunks of money as a result; I get smaller amounts trickling in on a pretty regular basis.


Wishes for 2010:

1. Further focus my energy on a smaller group of friends. This means narrowing my online circles as well as real life. I just don’t have the energy or the time; I can’t help or support everyone. HRH has already begun doing this in his own way. It’s not that I don’t like certain people with whom I’m easing myself out of a closer sphere of interaction; it’s mostly that I can see there are people who end up causing me exhaustion both mental and emotional, whether I enjoy interacting with them or not (and that covers both online and/or off).

2. Focus on my spinning. I going to let this be my relaxing thing for the year, and I’m not going to worry about using what I spin. A couple of months ago I decided that in early 2010 I’d open an Etsy shop and list stuff there as I spin it, and hey, if it sells, then I recoup the money for the fibre and some of the time, and I get to do more. It’s the process I love, not the product to be used for a specific project of mine. (Actually, I do love the product; I adore looking at skeins of yarn I’ve spun, and petting them, too. I just don’t want to be saddled with piles of them that I’ll never use.)

In Summary:

If I had to assign a value to 2009, I’d say that again, it’s been an overall good year. Watching the boy grow and develop in leaps and bounds (if one more person tells me that he’s ahead of his peer group in language, social, and physical terms I may pull my hair out) has been fabulous. HRH got his permanency, which means barring humungous disaster, we’ll be okay for the next twenty-five years as pertains to his career. We’re looking at a move to the south shore in 2010 as well, to be closer to HRH’s job and the boy’s kindergarten. I hate moving, but I’m actually looking forward to this because eof what it means to us.

So here’s to a quiet, successful, fulfilling 2010.